Divorce Shame

Your divorce isn’t proof that you’re broken, but society loves to whisper that it is. I’m Karin Nelson, a certified divorce coach, and I’m pulling apart the old story that ties women’s worth to marriage so you can finally see it for what it is: conditioning, not truth.
 
We start with something subtle but powerful, the way even a stranger’s divorce headline can trigger grief and judgment before we know any details. That reaction is learned. From books and movies to religion and family scripts, women are often taught that the highest achievement is being chosen by a man, staying chosen, and making the marriage last forever. When a relationship ends, that message stacks shame on top of normal grief and makes an already hard situation feel even heavier.
 
Then I zoom out and share a bit of history that reveals how intentional this messaging can be, including the evolution of the word “spinster” from a respected job title to an insult. We also talk about how legal structures around divorce have changed over time, and why modern freedom to leave doesn’t automatically erase old stigma. The core takeaway is simple and steady: your worth is inherent. It did not rise on your wedding day, and it does not drop because you divorced, asked for divorce, or were left.
 
To make it practical, I guide you through a short exercise you can do this week to identify the specific thought creating shame, trace where it came from, and decide whether you want to keep believing it. If you want more support, subscribe, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a review so more women can find the show.

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Transcript

Welcome And The Theme

Karin Nelson 0:00

Welcome to Becoming You Again, the podcast for women moving through divorce who want to rediscover themselves and build a life that actually feels like theirs. I'm your host, Karin Nelson, a certified divorce coach with a passion for helping women reconnect with their truth so that they can come home to who they truly are. Today we're talking about the cultural story that you've been telling yourself your worth is tied to in your marriage, where that story came from, how long it's been running, and why none of it was ever actually true. And then I'm going to talk about how you can finally start to put down the shame that was never yours to carry in the first place. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the podcast, my lovely ladies. I am so, so happy that you're here. Right now, I'm recording this podcast during my favorite time of day, and that is early morning. I wake up quite early, but I love the mornings. I love the early morning because it is so just like quiet and peaceful in my house. Everyone else is asleep. I've just got like the low lights on in my office. I'm sitting at my desk with a cozy, soft blanket on my lap. I have my cuff of my cup of coffee. This is one of the reasons why it's my favorite time of day, is it's my first cup of coffee. It's like warm, it's comforting. It just is this part of my day that I truly just cherish and savor. I just love being able to just be by myself, be in my thoughts, like in a way that feels inspiring, in a way that feels reflective, in a way that feels intentional, where I can think about what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my day, where I can think about who I am, how I've shown up, how I want to change things, how I want to be more authentic, like all of the things. And I love it. I just think it's such a great, beautiful part of my day, and I really look forward to it. Um, do you have a part of your life that feels like that? Or did you before you went through your divorce? I want you to know if you don't have a part of your day that you look forward to, try and create one. Figure out what that might be, what that might look like, even if it's for five minutes of your day, and try and implement that as often as you can. And if you had one before your divorce and it's kind of like gone by the wayside, maybe try and bring that back as much as possible or find a new way to create what you used to feel in those moments in the life that you're creating now. Anyway, that's just my little my little aside before we dive into this episode today. But I do want to say, like, you're special, you are unique, you are an individual who deserves some individual intentional time just for you every day. All right. So now that you've spent a few moments with me in my individual quiet time, I guess we could call it, what I wanted to talk today about in this podcast episode is something that I think is underneath so much of the pain that we as women carry as we go through our divorce. Like it's something that makes this already hard experience of divorce feel like 10 times heavier than it has to be. It's like an extra layer of suffering that is unnecessary that we do not have to carry around. But many of us don't even take a look at it. And I have to say, it was not something that I was even like paying attention to or maybe even aware of until about three-ish years ago. Like maybe I kind of knew it was there. Maybe it was a little bit more than three years ago, but either way, it's been within the last five years, let's say. Like I kind of understood it, I kind of saw it, but not enough to where I realized how insidious and pervasive it is. And it is the story that culture has been telling us as women for centuries about what we are worth, about what divorce means about us as a woman. And I'm gonna take you a little bit through the history, which I have been talking about a lot more in the last like little few episodes, but I do think it's really important to understand that history to see and understand where we are in the present moment. Because I think when we understand where these ideas came from and how they are starting to be challenged more often, they are starting to be out there more in the open, more talked about. That's when things are going to shift for you and things will hopefully get a little bit lighter. You will have less of that pervasive suffering that just feels so heavy. So a while back, I was scrolling through Instagram as one does, and a picture, like I think it was from People magazine or something. I don't, I don't remember what, but like just a picture popped up. And it was like this famous couple announced they're getting a divorce. And my first reaction before I even had a chance to like think about it was, oh, that's so sad. They seemed so happy. I don't follow these people, I don't know these people, obviously. I literally have no idea what it actually is like living in their life. And yet I had that pang of like grief on behalf of marriage in general. A marriage that I literally have no insight in, first of all. And second of all, I'm a divorce coach. Like I genuinely believe that divorce can be incredibly amazing. It can be the big like the beginning of the best, most amazing chapter of a woman's life. And even I had this automatic reaction of loss, sadness, like it shouldn't be happening. That's this is terrible for them. That's how deep this runs. That is how pervasive this cultural messing messaging is. You might be able to hear my cat in the background in the morning, is also the time when he does this little meow. So anyway, this is gonna add a little levity into this topic that we're talking about, right? But to get back to it, like we are constantly swimming in this cultural messaging, and we have been for our entire lives. We have been, and it has been going on for centuries, centuries, and it's everywhere. It's in books, it's in movies, it's in TV shows, it's in social media, it's at church, in your religion, it's at school, it's the thing that your aunt says when you go to the family party, it's the thing that your neighbor says when you're talking out at the mailbox, and all of it has been quietly, just like consistently teaching all of us, men and women, but women are the ones who absorb it because it's the message that is for us, right? That women's highest achievement is being chosen by a man, staying chosen, and then becoming a mother. Like marriage is the destination, and anything that falls short of that, that isn't forever, is a failure. And this is what that socialization does to you when you're going through a divorce. It piles on shame on top of the grief that you could be feeling. Whether it's grief that you're having over the end of the relationship, which you may or may not be feeling. I have many clients who are they're just they've been done for quite a while and they're just like, I don't feel any grief leaving this man. But they have grief over the kids and like the pain that this is going to cause their kids. They have grief over what they thought their life was gonna look like, they have grief over who they chose. Like, there's lots of areas that you can have grief, but this this conditioning, this socialization piles shame on top of it. And it is so insidious and so ingrained that it's shame that we often don't even recognize that we're having, that we're feeling, and we don't understand where it's coming from because we just think that it's a truth that that was that's part of our life. Like we are supposed to be chosen, and when we break up from that choosing that marriage, there's something wrong with us. We are worth less now in our life, right? So it takes this thing that's already hard, this divorce that's already hard, and it adds an extra layer of weight that is just constantly whispering in your ear, you're worthless now. Not worthless, but like worthless on the spectrum, right? Something's wrong with you. You couldn't keep this marriage together, and that feels really heavy. But the thing is, is because it's social conditioning, because it's something that society has created, it is not true. It's a story, it's a very, very, very, very old story that was written many, many, many, many years ago by men, I shall say, but a very old story that was never actually written to benefit you. So let me give you a little context around the history because I think it's important. I'm gonna start with the word spinster. Okay, we've all heard this word. It's been around for many, many thousands, not maybe not thousands, but hundreds, let's say, of years, okay. Um, but because the the history of this word, it actually tells a lot. It gives a lot of context to the whole story of how women's independence got rebranded as something shameful, right? Okay, so originally with this word specifically, we're we're in medieval England, roughly around the 1300s. And a spinster was just a woman who spun thread. That was her job, basically. Like spinning thread was a skilled labor. And it was one of the only trades that women were allowed to like learn and practice on their own, right? And it was how many women, married or not, earned their own income. It was just like one of those early trades where women earned their own income and they could be married or not. It wasn't like specific to a non-married woman, as the word kind of connotates now or has morphed into now, which I'm gonna talk about in a second. But like, so that word at that time, it was neutral. It was just like practical. It just described what the woman did for work. In legal documents from that time, you would see it written next to a woman's name, just in the same way that you would see like a blacksmith or baker next to a man's name, right? It was her occupation. It was her contribution to the economy. It was like this economic identity. And then over years, like something shifted, right? We have industrialization, we moved to textile production that's happening out of our homes, and it goes into factories. And with that, many, many women lost that particular form of economic independence, meaning they couldn't have that as their job because it went to factories. And so you weren't doing it in your home anymore, right? And as marriage became more and more kind of like the primary structure, the word spinster, it just kind of got reassigned as a term. So by the 1700s, it had changed from job title into a legal term for an unmarried woman. Somewhere in the 400 years, it went from neutral, meaning this is your job, married or unmarried, doesn't matter, to now it means you're unmarried. And by the 1800s, it became something even worse, which was basically an insult, right? It was like a warning to all the other women, well, don't become that. Don't be the spinster of the family, right? Because it basically at that point meant a woman who wasn't chosen. She was too old, too difficult, too something, right? And by too old, let's be real. I mean, we're talking like late 20s or maybe mid-20s or something. Oh, yeah, you're just too old. No. But like unwanted, undesirable, too difficult, past her prime, right? That's what it meant, but like now we know this is ridiculous. But do you see what's happening here? A word that once described a woman's economic power, her independence from needing the man's money to live her life, even if she was married. It's always a good idea for a woman to have her own economic independence, married or not. But that was slowly over centuries turned into a word that became an insult to women that meant she had failed at her most important job, according to society, which like apparently meant getting a man to want her. This is not an accident. This happened on purpose. And it is truly because of the system that is in place, which is patriarchy, which was set up by men, and it's the cultural rewriting the value of female independence into a liability. And that rewrite, as we well know, is still running in the background today of your thoughts, of my thoughts, of you how you think of yourself as a divorcing or divorced woman and how I thought of myself too. Women couldn't own property in our own names, like financial survival. It was almost entirely dependent on having a husband through through the this line of history, right? Marriage didn't used to be just a romantic choice. In fact, it very often wasn't. And in some countries, it still isn't. It's more of like a financial or a legal economic structure that allowed women to exist in the world where they didn't have financial stability. So through the years, we're still getting, you know, we're still moving up through history. For many, many years, you still had to prove if you were a woman and you wanted a divorce, you still had to prove fault in a court of law, right? If there was adultery, if there was abandonment, even, if there was abuse, you had to prove that there was a valid reason to leave. Otherwise, you just had to stay. And if you couldn't prove it, if you couldn't convince that judge that it was a bad marriage, like there was the divorce wasn't happening. And just doing it because you didn't want to be married anymore, because you were not a good match, because you were unhappy, because your partner just sucked and had zero integrity and they couldn't just like keep their word about anything. No, you're not getting a divorce. That didn't happen until like after 1969, and the bulk of it, like 1980s and 90s, that's when no-fault divorce came into play. That's when you had a chance to be able to get a divorce for any reason it didn't matter in every state. Except we know from New York was the latest to adopt this, and it was a few years ago, but but um either way, like it is not a coincidence that we have this term, spinster, that is an insult to women who aren't married to like try and keep us in our place. And now we have this fear of like, oh no, I don't want that title. I don't want to be considered a spinster. But then also that like it's harder to get a divorce for many, many years to keep women in their place, right? But now, now we understand these things. Now we finally have the legal freedom to leave marriages that are not working, that we don't want to be in any longer. That choice is finally here. So let's get back to where we are right now. Let's get back to the present. If you find yourself carrying shame about your divorce, and I want you to know that so many women are. You're not if you're feeling it, you're not the only one. Because I work with women every day who feel this. Women come to me in consults, women message me on social media every day, feeling this heavy amount of shame and guilt. And I want you to see where it's coming from because it is cultural. It is a story that was written for you, and it was handed to you on a fucking platter the moment you were born into a world where women had no rights, no financial independence, no legal voice, no option but to make marriage work no matter what. That is a story, and it is an old story, and it's an outdated story. And it was never about your worth. It's about keeping you small, it's about keeping you in a structure where you can stay managed, where you can stay under someone's thumb. Your value as a woman, it did not go up when you got married. It did not go down when you got divorced or when you asked for the divorce or when someone left you. And I mean that fully and truthfully. Your worth is inherent. That word inherent means it is yours from the moment you are born. You are at full capacity, and it cannot be added to, it cannot be taken away depending on your relationship status, or for literally any reason. It doesn't mean that if you get a bigger ring, or you have this court date, or you have this wedding day, or you have this beautiful, giant, amazing wedding, or you have this, you know, Instagram story that tells everybody how amazing your marriage is, and then two weeks later you're like the truth comes out, and we're all we're actually getting a divorce. It doesn't mean that your worth is going up and down and fluctuating because of all of that. Your worth is stable, it's always 100%. So let me give you some practical tools around the awareness as you come into this information of like questioning, am I feeling the shame? And what is that shame about? Is it about this? Is it about this inherent worth that I didn't think I have, but I actually am starting to see is real? So here's the exercise that I want you to try this week. So, what I want you to do is I want you to get out a piece of paper or open your notes app on your phone. Start by identifying a thought that you have about your divorce that is creating a feeling of shame, that is creating a feeling of guilt, or a sense of I'm less than, right? It might sound like I've failed my kids or I couldn't make it work, or no one's gonna want me now, or I should have tried harder, or people think I'm a mess, or people are judging me, like whatever the version is for you. I don't know, but write it down, get a couple thoughts out, and then pick one, right? We're not gonna judge it. We're just going to get it on paper and see it and be aware of it. And then I just want you to get curious about it. Like ask yourself, where did this thought come from? Is this stupid is this a belief that like my brain actually came up with? Spoiler alert, probably not. It was is this a belief that was handed to me? Just become aware of this, right? Did I absorb this watching other women on TV, watching movies, reading books from church, from the leaders, from the way I was raised, from my own family. Like, where did this thought come from? Did it come from the system that I live in? And is do I need to believe that my worth is contingent on my relationship status? And the thing is is here's what I want you to know like, you have so much. Consent here in terms of what you're going to believe and not believe. If you want to believe that your worth is contingent on your relationship, you're allowed to believe that. I personally think that that's not a great thought because that makes me feel like a piece of shit, and I don't want to feel like a piece of shit. But if you if it doesn't make you feel like a piece of shit and you like that thought, keep it. Right? This is just a matter of like being aware of what's happening in our brain and the stories that we've got going on, and then intentionally deciding do I actually want to keep believing that? And if I do, fine. And if I don't, what do I want to believe instead? That's it. Like there's no right or wrong answer here. There's just what feels best and right to you. So sit with it. You don't even have to have the answer of what you want to think instead yet. Right now, we're just questioning where the shame is coming from, where that story is coming from, and if you want to keep believing that story. So that's it. Right? Right now, we're just gonna sit with it and we're gonna understand and have awareness around where it's coming from. Spend some time with you. Give yourself that little bit of time, kind of like I do in the morning, to just reflect, to think, to understand more about you and what is happening in your brain and where those stories are coming from, where that shame might be actually coming from. All right, my friends, that is what I have for you today. Thank you so much for being here. I love you so much. You are amazing. You truly, truly are. Thank you for coming back. I will be back next week. Hi, friend. I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life with weekly coaching, real life practice, and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to Karin Nelson Coaching.com. That's www.karincoaching.com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. And for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married, make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.